Iran is the new Nazi Germany and its president, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, the new Hitler. Or so Israeli officials have been declaring for months
as they and their American allies try to persuade the doubters in Washington that
an attack on Tehran is essential. And if the latest media reports are to be trusted,
it looks like they may again be winning the battle for hearts and minds: Vice
President Dick Cheney is said to be diverting the White House back on track to
launch a military strike.
Earlier this year Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's opposition leader and the
man who appears to be styling himself scaremonger-in-chief, told us: "It's
1938 and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs."
Of Ahmadinejad, he said: "He is preparing another Holocaust for the Jewish
state."
A few weeks ago, as Israel's military intelligence claimed – as it has been
doing regularly since the early 1990s – that Iran is only a year or so away from
the "point of no return" on developing a nuclear warhead, Netanyahu
was at it again. "Iran could be the first undeterrable nuclear power,"
he warned, adding: "This is a Jewish problem like Hitler was a Jewish problem
… The future of the Jewish people depends on the future of Israel."
But Netanyahu has been far from alone in making extravagant claims about a
looming genocide from Iran. Israel's new president, Shimon Peres, has compared
an Iranian nuclear bomb to a "flying concentration camp." And the
prime minister, Ehud Olmert, told a German newspaper last year: "[Ahmadinejad]
speaks as Hitler did in his time of the extermination of the entire Jewish nation."
There is an interesting problem with selling the "Iran as Nazi Germany"
line. If Ahmadinejad really is Hitler, ready to commit genocide against Israel's
Jews as soon as he can get his hands on a nuclear weapon, why are some 25,000
Jews living peacefully in Iran and more than reluctant to leave despite repeated
enticements from Israel and American Jews?
What is the basis for Israel's dire forecasts – the ideological scaffolding
being erected, presumably, to justify an attack on Iran? Helpfully, as George
Bush defended his Iraq policies last month, he reminded us yet again of the
menace Iran supposedly poses: it is "threatening to wipe Israel off the
map."
This myth has been endlessly recycled since a translating
error was made of a speech Ahmadinejad delivered nearly two years ago. Farsi
experts have verified that the Iranian president, far from threatening to destroy
Israel, was quoting from an earlier speech by the late Ayatollah Khomeini in
which he reassured supporters of the Palestinians that "the Zionist regime
in Jerusalem" would "vanish from the page of time."
He was not threatening to exterminate Jews or even Israel. He was comparing
Israel's occupation of the Palestinians with other illegitimate systems
of rule whose time had passed, including the Shahs who once ruled Iran, apartheid
South Africa and the Soviet empire. Nonetheless, this erroneous translation
has survived and prospered because Israel and her supporters have exploited
it for their own crude propaganda purposes.
In the meantime, the 25,000-strong Iranian Jewish community is the largest in
the Middle East outside Israel and traces its roots back 3,000 years. As one
of several non-Muslim minorities in Iran, Jews there suffer discrimination,
but they are certainly no worse off than the one million Palestinian citizens
of Israel – and far better off than Palestinians under Israeli occupation in
the West Bank and Gaza.
Iranian Jews have little influence on decision-making and are not allowed to
hold senior posts in the army or bureaucracy. But they enjoy many freedoms.
They have an elected representative in parliament, they practice their religion
openly in synagogues, their charities are funded by the Jewish diaspora, and
they can travel freely, including to Israel. In Tehran there are six kosher
butchers and about 30 synagogues. Ahmadinejad's office recently made a
donation to a Jewish hospital in Tehran.
As Ciamak Moresadegh, an Iranian Jewish leader, observed: "If you think
Judaism and Zionism are one, it is like thinking Islam and the Taliban are the
same, and they are not." Iran's leaders denounce Zionism, which they blame
for fueling discrimination against the Palestinians, but they have also repeatedly
avowed that they have no problem with Jews, Judaism or even the state of Israel.
Ahmadinejad, caricatured as a merchant of genocide, has in fact called for "regime
change" – and then only in the sense that he believes a referendum
should be held of all inhabitants of Israel and the occupied territories, including
refugees from war, on the nature of the government.
Despite the absence of any threat to Iran's Jews, the Israeli media recently
reported that the Israeli government has been trying to find new ways to entice
Iranian Jews to Israel. The Ma'ariv newspaper pointed out that previous
schemes had found few takers. There was, noted the report, "a lack of desire
on the part of thousands of Iranian Jews to leave." According to the New
York-based Forward newspaper, a campaign to convince Iranian Jews to
emigrate to Israel caused only 152 out of these 25,000 Jews to leave Iran between
October 2005 and September 2006, and most of them were said to have emigrated
for economic reasons, not political ones.
To step up these efforts – and presumably to avoid the embarrassing incongruence
of claiming an imminent second Holocaust while thousands of Jews live happily
in Tehran – Israel is now backing a move by Jewish donors to guarantee every
Iranian Jewish family $60,000 to settle in Israel, in addition to a host of
existing financial incentives that are offered to Jewish immigrants, including
loans and cheap mortgages.
The announcement was met with scorn by the Society of Iranian Jews, which issued
a statement that their national identity was not for sale. "The identity
of Iranian Jews is not tradeable for any amount of money. Iranian Jews are among
the most ancient Iranians. Iran's Jews love their Iranian identity and
their culture, so threats and this immature political enticement will not achieve
their aim of wiping out the identity of Iranian Jews."
However, this financial gesture may not only be unwelcome but self-fulfilling
too, if past experience is the yardstick. Israel introduced a similar scheme
a few years ago, when Argentina's economy plunged into deep recession,
broadcasting an offer of $20,000 to every Jew who settled in Israel. Months
later the Israeli media reported a rise in anti-Semitic attacks in Argentina,
only adding to the pressure on Jews there to leave. Of course, there was no
mention of a possible causal connection between the attacks and Israel's
generous offer to Jews to abandon their homeland as other Argentinians sank
into poverty.
But if financial enticements – and a possible popular backlash – fail
to move Iranian Jews, there is good reason to fear that Israel may resort to
other, more dubious ways of encouraging them to emigrate. That is certainly
a path Israel has chosen before with other communities of Arab Jews, whom it
has regarded either as a pool of potential spies and agents provocateurs to
be used when needed or as "human dust," in the words of Israel's first
prime minister, David Ben Gurion, to be recruited to Israel's "demographic
battle" against the Palestinians.
In "Operation Susannah"
of 1954, for example, Israel recklessly recruited a group of Egyptian Jews to
stage a series of explosions in Egypt in a bid to discourage Britain from withdrawing
from the Suez Canal zone. When the plot came to light, it naturally cast a shadow
of disloyalty over Egypt's wider Jewish community. Following Israel's invasion
and occupation of Sinai two years later, the government of Gamal Abdel Nasser
expelled some 25,000 Egyptian Jews and, after others were imprisoned on suspicion
of spying, the rest soon left.
Even more notoriously, Israel went to greater lengths to ensure the exit of
the Arab world's largest Jewish population, in Iraq. In 1950 a series of bombs
targeted on Jews in Baghdad forced a rapid exodus of some 130,000 Iraqi Jews
to Israel, convinced that Arab extremists were behind the attacks. Only later
did it emerge that the bombs had been planted by members of the Zionist
underground, supported by the Israeli government.
Now, Iran's Jews may find themselves treated in much the same manner –
as simple human fodder. Stories are growing of Israel exploiting the free movement
between Iran and Israel enjoyed by Iranian Jews and their Israeli relatives
to carry out spying operations on Iran's nuclear program. Such reports have
come from reliable sources such as the American investigative journalist Seymour
Hersh, citing US government officials.
The fallout from such actions is not difficult to predict. Besieged by the US
and the international community, Tehran is cracking down on dissent and minority
groups, fearful that its own grip on power is shaky and that the well-publicized
subversion being carried out by US and Israeli agents is likely only to be stepped
up. So far most officials in Tehran have been careful to avoid suggesting that
Iran's Jews have double loyalties, as has the local Jewish community itself,
both of them aware of Israel's interests in provoking such a confrontation.
But as the strains increase, and Israel's need to prove Tehran's genocidal intent
grows ever stronger, that policy may end up being forfeited – and with
it the future of Iran's Jews.
More important than the welfare of Iranian Jewish families, it seems, is the
value of Iranian Jews as a propaganda tool in Israel's battle to persuade
the world that coexistence with the Muslim world is impossible. For those who
want to engineer a clash of civilizations, the 3,000-year-old Jewish legacy
in Iran is not something to be treasured, only another obstacle to war.
